With the increasing popularity of mobile terminals, subscribers are gradually more and more dependent on the mobile terminals. For example, a subscriber would like to store phone numbers required to be remembered as well as their related information into a telephone directory as much as possible, and hopes not to lose information due to replacement of his/her mobile terminal. However, because of constraints of a storage space and storage method in a traditional SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card, the capacity of a telephone directory is limited, which is unable to meet requirements of the subscriber operating the telephone directory in the SIM card.
In recent years, since the subscribers' requirements on intellectualization and multimedia of SIM cards are increased, a SIM card supporting a SCWS (Smartcard Web Server) function (Smart SIM card) emerges. Such a SIM card may be regarded as a server for replacing the traditional SIM card that is widely used at present. As the smart SIM card has large capacity, it can store a relatively large number of phone numbers and their related information.
At present, in the case that a mobile terminal uses a smart SIM card, there are two methods for operating telephone directories based on the mobile terminal.
One method is to use different operating menus for a telephone directory in a storage of a mobile terminal and a telephone directory in a smart SIM card respectively, operate the telephone directory in the storage using a telephone directory menu of the mobile terminal, and send an APDU (Application protocol data unit) to the smart SIM card according to the IS07816-4 specification using a STK (SIM Tool Kit) menu, so as to operate the telephone directory in the smart SIM card. However, the method of operating the telephone directory using different menus cannot meet the subscribers' requirements of operating the telephone directories both in the smart SIM card and in a storage space of the mobile terminal through a uniform menu.
The other method is to operate the telephone directory in the smart SIM card and the telephone directory in the mobile terminal through the existing same telephone directory menu. Since the storage location and format of the telephone directory in the smart SIM card are not the same as those in the traditional SIM card and do not conform to the format described in section 10.5.1 in the GSM 11.11 specification, although both the telephone directory in the smart SIM card and the telephone directory in the storage space of the mobile terminal can be operated through the existing same telephone directory menu, the subscriber can only operate the first 254 entries in the telephone directory in the smart SIM card and can not operate the last 1746 entries in the telephone directory, therefore, the last 1746 entries in the telephone directory have to be kept idle, resulting in the waste of telephone directory resources in the smart SIM card.